Covering Routine Events

Here's the thread on covering routine stories, courtesy of Joe Hight. At the end, could you put a link to my handout on routine stories, or do you want to just repeat the handout?

Steve Silberman, managing editor of The Idaho Statesman, started a thread on "covering routine events" with this e-mail in May 2001: I'm trying to develop some training in two different areas.

1. I want to bring more story telling to our everyday stories. Just last week Who Wants to Be A Millionaire came to Boise for tryouts. Our story was too straightforward and dull. Ditto with our Cinco de Mayo coverage. We cover a lot of festivals, fairs, community events, etc. Our best writers can do a great job, of course. But our less experienced reporters have trouble spinning stories. Any good ideas for training?

2. I have a couple of reporters who are slow. I'm looking for tips/suggestions on ways to help them speed up.

Here are the responses:

Bill Dedman: One tactic I try when sending reporters out to a routine event (at the Chicago Sun-Times) is to encourage them to focus. Don't try to tell the history of Cinco de Mayo, or cover the entire Earth Day story, in what will probably be a short story anyway. Find one person to tell the story. For example, at a graduation, find one graduate or parent -- or person who idolizes the speaker. Find one fifth-grader at Earth Day who is nagging her parents about recycling.

I suppose that the normal preparation we would do for a news story gets in the way of storytelling, and that it's better to find one person and include description. Often young reporters come back from a meeting without anything in their notes (or memories) of what it looked like.

In other words, don't include anything that is B matter, that can be written ahead of time. The reader already knows who Nelson Mandela or Bob Newhart is; make us feel like we saw him and heard him speak. (The opposite advice might apply to your slow reporter, who may need to start writing earlier.)

The same applies to sports. Take any sports story from tonight's wire and try to find any proof in it at all that the writer attended the game. None. Just quotes and stats. No one sliding hard into third, or what Sosa did after he hit that 400th home run. Too much B matter, not enough observation.

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Kate Long: The kinds of questions assigning editors ask -- before and after the reporter reports -- either encourage or discourage storytelling. A suggestion: Listen to the way your assignment editors talk with reporters about stories. Listen to the words they use.

Who encourages storytelling? Who's inviting grey blobs?

The editor who speaks in generalities/abstractions ("We need something on hospital cost containment") will elicit more grey blobs than the editor who asks questions that say, "Give me a story about people who do things". (E.g. "OK, let's list the cast of characters" or "Tell me about this guy. What did / will he do? Who did what to push this bill? What's the most interesting thing anyone did? Who was in the crowd? Who interests you most at this point? Why? What did they do that led up to this?" Etc.)

Editor questions ain't a magic wand, but they do influence reporters -- consciously or unconsciously -- especially reporters who don't grasp the difference between narrative, analysis, and information-dispensing. A good editor can steer reporters toward storytelling with every comment.

The best editors also gear questions/comments to the reporter's specific weakness. For instance, Sally routinely produces stories in which nothing moves through time. Her tuned-in editor points this out, then routinely says things like, "Who will do what? What led up to this? What happened then? Next?" Reminds her.

Listen to the editors. If you're not pleased, get them some training on narrative tools and skilled questioning.

Steve also asked for ideas re. slow reporters: Ask them to describe their process, from idea germ to send button. Look at their notebooks. Awhile back, I discovered that a very bright, but slow reporter was transcribing his notes into the computer after he came in. None of us had noticed. Too many calls before they go out? Waiting till they get back to the office to outline the story? Thinking they have to get the lead polished first? Etc.

Hope this is helpful. Glad you're asking about daily stories.

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Steve Buttry: I do a workshop on deadline writing (which may only be part of the problem with your slow reporters). Click here for Steve's handout for that workshop.

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Tom Silvestri: Bill makes a key point: Focus.

Might try this also: Have the person boil down the event into a five or six graph fact box. At least you'll have the basics covered. Lack of focus sometimes can be traced to the reporter missing the point of the event or being clueless about why it's being held. On a festival, for example, doing the "history" of Cinco de Mayo in a fact box first frees the writer to be creative: asking festival-goers to recall the reason for the celebration.

Shock of all shocks -- no one knows why we hold the festival!?!?!?!

Another tip for non-creative reporters: Tell them to go with a photographer and tell them to keep asking the shooter, "What are you seeing? What's interesting to you." Photogs have an uncanny ability to find the good stuff. And at least the story will match the darn photo when both reporter and photographer return to the office.

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Kevin McGrath: Here's a more important concept that hasn't come up yet: Work the idea before you go. Good stories, and good storytelling, stem from good ideas. In the cases you raised, one of the best pieces of advice I've seen is to look for the basic human element. Ask yourself and your writer: What's this story really about? A visit by "Millionaire" is about dreams of striking it rich, or grabbing 15 minutes of fame. A Cinco de Mayo story is usually about family and self-identity. One of my team's writers covered a swim club's year-end exhibition last year and found a story about transitions in life. He covered a business closing and found a story about a woman who refused to have her dream defeated by failure. This stuff's all around, every day, in the things we cover. If we target them mentally before we head out, we're more likely to find a better story once we get there, even if it's only by virtue of changing the focus or theme at the scene.

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Chip Scanlan: Kevin's focusing advice is dead-on and inspirational (as is much of this thread). Such thinking not only improves newswriting, I think it helps us understand that one of the major contributions we make is not just news, but meaning. My contribution to this excellent thread is this link from the Providence Journal's "Power of Words" site: an account of how reporter Ariel Sabar handled an event assignment: http://www.projo.com/words/tip513.htm
Our rallying cry: No small stories, only small minds.

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Jack Hart:
1. In my experience, you get storytelling in everyday stories to the extent that reporters understand story theory and the deep structure of actual stories. (As opposed to news stories or feature stories.) That is, they need to understand basic narrative, including the protagonist-complication-resolution framework and the exposition-rising action-climax-denouement structure. They need to know the difference between summary narrative and dramatic narrative, direct quotes and dialogue, topic construction and scenic construction and so on.

And their editors have to understand all those things, too. Jon Franklin's book is a good place to start, but it's just a beginning.

2. Slow writers usually skip over important parts of the writing process. I suggest interviewing them to find out how much time they devote to refining the idea, planning the reporting and organizing their information. The problem often lies at the organization stage. And they may have problems with their drafting, too, usually because they fail to distinguish between drafting (which should be fast and loose) and polishing (which should be critically minded and specific).

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Laura Coleman: One basic I tell folks that can work in many routine stories is the idea of using all five senses to tell the story. that, and the previously mentioned idea of focusing on one person's experience/background, can work. When they go to an event, they can do a better job putting the reader there if they tell the reader what he or she not only would see, but hear, smell, touch and even taste.

And if they don't go along with that idea, make them research whether undercoating of cars is necessary in Idaho. (Sorry others, inside joke to the man whose wedding I toasted long ago.)

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Michael Roberts: Break each of these broad needs down into skill sets and plan a series of short sessions on each. Provide examples. Set weekly goals (or other short term goals) to use each technique in daily work. Recognize success.

1. "Story telling" can involve writing with visual/tactile detail; simple story structures (i.e. wine glass; layer cake); point of view; characterization through description. I also recommend Kate Long's "Tuning Toolbox" approach, about creating a movie in the mind with close-ups and wide shots; vantage point; movement through time/space, etc. And chapter 3 of Don Murray's "Writing to Deadline" has lots of good stuff.

2. "Slow." I'm not sure what that means or involves. Slow to deadline? Slow writers? Or as the horse trainer observes in "The Reivers," just plain slow.

Steve Buttry incorporated several ideas from this thread into a workshop he was developing for the Omaha World-Herald. The handout for that workshop can be found here: http://www.notrain-nogain.com/Train/Res/Report/rout.asp